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Showing posts from August, 2013

Off-Page Search Engine Optimization

Publishers cannot directly control off-page ranking factors. These factors include inbound links, social channel activity and online customer reviews. Inbound Links: When other sites link to yours, your website shows up higher in search results. You can measure how many inbound links you currently have at www.opensiteexplorer.org . Once you collect this data, consider taking these actions: . Scan your highest-authority inbound links for opportunities to create more similar links. . Scan your competitors' highest-authority inbound links. Can you get those links too, or do they provide ideas for getting similar links? . Inbound links from non-profit (.org) and education (.edu) sites are especially valuable. Do you have any? Should you have more from your friends and partners in these realms? Build your inbound links gradually. Google algorithms will notice a quick accumulation of links and may penalize you. Get your staff on board with the idea of

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

On-page search ranking factors are those that are entirely within the website publisher's control. In other words, it's the content you place on your webpages. Content: You must keep your content fresh with regular updates on all pages. When other sites link to yours, your website shows up higher in search results. You can measure how many inbound links you currently have at www.opensiteexplorer.org . "Evergreen content" was a trendy term in the SEO world for a while, which meant certain content can be relevant and timely year after year, so you can utilize it over and over. For example, every winter you likely post information about your winter tire specials and vehicle winterization services, so why not just flip the same information up there and be done with it? This is a lazy approach to marketing. Put some thought and effort into all of the information that goes onto your website and you will see the results, such as longer page

Demystifying SEO

Tips for Launching Your SEO Program Assess Your Website Platform - One of the most important aspects of a strong SEO program is the ability to understand the flexibility of your website. Often we start working with a firm that has a beautiful website and high aspirations for SEO only to discover the website platform they are using is very rigid and will not allow them to make many, if any, changes. So the first step is to determine the platform your website is built on. Generally there are three categories under which website platforms can be classified including; flat file website, HTML coded, open source content management systems (CMS), and proprietary (closed source) CMS. So as not to get lost in the technical details, generally speaking, the easiest systems to work with are open source CMS; examples include Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. These systems are easily customized and are built to be SEO-friendly. The most difficult systems are proprietary CMS

Top Tips for Excelling on Bing

If you want to hit the top of Bing's rankings for your chosen keywords, here are the best ways to score a high ranking: * First and foremost, make sure that social tactics are a huge part of your marketing strategies. A heavy presence on * Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and related sites is a must. * Be a heavy Facebook user, as opposed to Google+. Leverage your fans, and encourage social signals (Likes, comments, etc.) * Test your keywords specifically against the Bing audience. What will get you high rankings in Google will likely be different in Bing. The smaller audience also means less competition for your keywords, so you're more likely to do well using more popular selections on Bing than on Google. * Bing is a stickler for error free XML sitemaps. Make sure yours have zero 404s, or the Bingbot might ignore the whole thing. * The Bingbot is also big on Robots.txt files. If your site doesn't have one, it risks being completely ignored by Bing.

Grand Flagallery - WordPress Plugin

Grand Flagallery - powerfull media content plugin. It provides a comprehensive interface for handling image galleries, audio and video. http://wordpress.org/plugins/flash-album-gallery/ my motto is "Keep it simple" and "don't leave anything for tomorrow that can be done today." Regards Gerald Crawford Stellenbosch South Africa Cell: +27-0720390184 (mobile) E-mail: gerald@webcraft.ws

Know Your Landing Page

By identifying your best content, you quickly learn two things: 1. Which pages are most worth promoting. 2. How you can improve on your future content. But how can you identify your best content? With this article, I'll avoid weighing in on which metric in particular is most important (be it sales, pages per visit, etc). Instead, the focus will be on how to interpret your analytics without relying on "most" as an indication of "best." For example, a page that results in more sales may simply be doing so, because it has more visits. That says nothing about whether it's the piece of content most worth promoting. This is going to be an advanced article, involving spreadsheets and standard deviations, so it might not be for everybody. I'll try to keep it step-by-step and fairly easy to comprehend but, even then, it's worth asking how much time you want to invest in analytics, as opposed to outreach and other activities.

Marketing Tools in Today's Digital World

Marketing online is serious business, and without tools that support your mission, your campaigns don't stand a chance. While you could wade through the massive volume of marketing tools currently available in this dynamic and fast-paced space, we aim to simplify the process by presenting you with today's best suite of products. You already know about must-haves like WordPress, Google Analytics, and SEOMoz - keep reading to find out what modern tools you may not be aware of that can literally change your business life for the better. #1 - KISSmetrics KISSmetrics takes an innovative approach to site analytics. Instead of tracking vanity metrics (think pageviews, time spent, bounce rates, etc.), KISS looks at the data that actually impacts your revenues. Relatively speaking, this revolves around people, i.e. your customers, and how they interact with your site. KISS highlights important figures like conversion rates, lifetime customer values, churn

Keep Your WordPress Blog Safe and Secure

WordPress is a great platform to build a small business Web site, but you must stay on top of security measures. As some of you know, my blog was recently hacked by a bot looking for weakness in my WordPress and/or plugins. Hackers left thousands of spam comments with embedded links, all of my plugins were stripped from the site, and it wasn't working very well. It was pretty much a nightmare and there was no easy fix. It was tough for some of my readers to find the forms to submit to be a guest on #SmallBizChat or to be a guest blogger. I learned a lot about WordPress in this process that I think you all could benefit from. Here are 6 steps to keep your WordPress blog safe and secure. Do regular maintenance. Just like with your car needing an oil change, your WordPress blog should have a basic tune-up regularly. Make sure you are using the latest version of WordPress and keep your plugins up-to-date too. It's easy for plugins to create a conflic

Benefits of mobile marketing

1. It is more affordable than other forms of advertising - just a normal text message fee. 2. You can reach out to people anywhere. You are not limited to your physical area, but to wherever the mobile phone is you are trying to reach. 3. The response rate is higher than with a flyer or classified advertising. 4. The mobile device is a personal item belonging to only one person. You can, therefore, target your marketing more precisely to that person or a group of people like him. 5. The mobile device has joined the wallet and keys as something you always take with you. This means that you can reach your customer anywhere, at any time and that they will read your message almost instantly and act on it. 6. It is easy to pay from a mobile device as payment processors are built into them. 7. You can track the payments back to the mobile number which means you can create a profile of your customer and his buying preferences. 8. You can accurately measure

Why You Need a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Now that 80% of the world's population own a mobile phone and four out of five consumers shop using their smartphone, jumping on the mobile marketing bandwagon sooner rather than later is a strategy webmasters cannot ignore. Mobile marketing is not just trundling along - it's going at breakneck speeds and is only going to get faster! Mobile Marketing is the Future With the way mobile technology is advancing, consumers will become more reliant on their handheld devices to do their shopping. Indeed, mobile marketing is the fastest growing industry EVER! According to Monetate Ecommerce quarterly, the growth of consumers using their mobiles to shop is steadily growing each quarter and has almost doubled from Q1 in 2012 to Q1 in 2013. Analysts estimate that mobile marketing will outstrip fixed internet access next year. The simple fact of the matter is that the world is going SoLoMo - consumers are shopping socially, searching locally and using mobile de